Name Nicole Wittenberg | ||
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Nicole Wittenberg is an American artist based in New York City. She is a curator, professor, writer, and painter awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters coveted John Koch Award for best young figurative painter in 2012. She is professor in the Critical Theory Department at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
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Wittenberg was born in San Francisco, CA, and received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2003. Her work is featured in several prominent collections. From 2011-2014 she served as a teacher at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture and the Bruce High Quality Foundation University
Exhibitions include The Female Gaze, Part Two: Women Look at Men at Cheim Read Gallery, Look! New Acquisitions at the Albertina Museum in Vienna, Nowhere But Here, curated by Alex Katz at Colby College Museum of Art, also featuring Chantal Joffe, Elizabeth Peyton and Chuck Close.
Work
Starting each of her works from a combination of drawings from slow-motion video, models in the studio and photographic images, Wittenberg primarily uses sex as subject mater. But her love of sexual material goes deeper than politics or even lust. She's looking for fresh ways to engage art's long history of sexual imagery.
Wittenberg’s style can be classified as figurative, but also in opposition to the cannon of figurative painting. Her decision to portray sexually aroused men is a subject that is "actually underrepresented in Western painting in any century.” None of her paintings are representational of a discrete event or viewpoint, David Salle praises her commitment to reinventing realism.
She builds and often repeats images from drawings, monotypes, painting and collages. Wittenberg spends days distancing herself from the material and living it, until the direction of the “emotional content” sinks in. She describes, “repetition touches upon the question of engagement, which is a big question in painting. My engagement with the image over the course of repetition heightens my own imagination about it.”
She is a very active printmaker and works with Lococo Fine Art Publisher in St. Louis.
Personal life
She currently lives and works in Chinatown in New York City.
Exhibitions
Permanent Collections
Works by this artist can be seen at: